The following relates to the image processing arts, optical character recognition, and so forth.
Optical Character Recognition software, commonly referenced as “OCR,” recognizes the glyphs in an image and output corresponding machine-encoded characters. More sophisticated OCR software aims to recognize the font type and font size, but many versions of OCR software do not. In addition, some available OCR systems combine several different versions of OCR software so as to increase the recognition rate, but these systems fail to produce the font size information. In general, font size information provides additional benefits to the OCR process, e.g., improved visualization, information extraction, and the like. For example, font size information can be important in subsequent processing, for instance when forming paragraphs or labeling text fragments as a title, caption, or the like.
For applications that require font size information, this places additional constraints on the selection of a suitable OCR solution, which can filter out several convenient and often inexpensive OCR solutions. For example, an inexpensive OCR solution may produce highly accurate transcriptions for Latin characters, but fails to produce the font size information. That is, suitable OCR solutions may output the character (Unicode) corresponding to the text, the relative position of the text (x, y) on the page, and its geometry (height, width), but not its font size or font type. Unfortunately, there is a lack of suitable fast and robust methods for computing the body size of text output during OCR operations.